The illustrative embodiments described in the present application are useful in systems including those for managing assets and more particularly are useful in systems including those for managing asset lifecycle for an enterprise including procurement, tracking and assignment, service, activity, billing and reporting for assets such as fleets of business machines including copiers, printers and mailing machines.
Many companies purchase business machines such as output devices including printers in a haphazard fashion in which users request printers from the Information Technology (IT) department. The company may have an IT budget per organization, but may not study organization usage and life cycle management. Such strategies are based upon individual need at a point in time and may not consider changes to those needs over time and when making future purchase decisions. In such environments, half of the output devices may be underutilized and a quarter may be over-utilized.
Companies typically spend between one and three percent of gross revenue on printing costs. About 20 percent of that cost includes office printing, copying and faxing. A company may have one printer per 4 employees and one copier per 50 employees. Progressive cost-conscious companies may perform a static rightsizing analysis in which output devices are strategically distributed across the enterprise. Such static analysis may be expensive to complete and require productivity savings over time to produce a return on investment for the analysis.
Certain companies utilize capital asset management software applications such as those available from Peregrine or Main Control. Such systems may not support usage recording or user-based cost accounting. Additionally, such systems may not support management of many client fleets using either an on-site decentralized basis or a centralized, cross-client basis.